Understanding the root cause and the dangers of this shift requires exposing
the most fundamental and most common misconception concerning the underlying
purpose of the monopoly granted by our copyright law. The primary purpose of
copyright is not, as many people believe, to protect authors against those
who would steal the fruits of their labor. However, this misconception,
repeated so often that it has become accepted among the public as true,
poses serious dangers to the core purpose that copyright law is designed to
serve.

I'm in the car waiting for lunch when I hear this new remake of
American Pie by this
lush female singer. Of course immediately after the song the radio station
launches into this extended set of commercials that last the way home so I
don't know who did the song.

But everytime I hear that song, even if it is the original version, I can't
help but think of
Wierd Al's version.

My first thought is Holy Cow! The
Sun Sentinel
wants to do a story on my site! And they even spelled my name right!

In my excitement I skip a crucial paragraph and pick up here:

While visiting your site I noticed your web pages could use
a few simple adjustments to make them easier to find on the
search engines. I also noticed your page layout and customer
navigation could be optimized to increase customer
responsiveness.

Okay, now I know something is wrong. My pages are already easy to find on
the search engines. Heck, they're the only agents coming to my website with
any regularity and any searches on “Sean Conner” or “Captain Napalm”
usually bring back links to my website on the first or second page (at
worse). Now, what was that paragraph I missed?

I am writing to you because you are listed as the site
administrator at www.sunsent.com and I have some
information that should be of interest to you.

I was most likely still working at
CyberGate when this was
registered. At the time, I was Head Sysadmin, Head Programmer, Head
Technical Support and Chief Bottle Washer (I left shortly thereafter, that
being my first real experience with the whole net.slave thang). The records
never got updated.

There's a major controversy on a mailing list I'm subscribed to. The list
in question (about classic computers) had to change hosts and the software
used to manage the list changed.

The upshot is that under the old software, the Reply-To: field was
set to be the list itself. That meant that if you wanted to send a private
reply, you had to change the address the message was being sent to. As a
consequence, a few private messages were sent to the list by mistake.

The new software does not set the Reply-To: field. So to reply to
the list, you have to ether change the address the message was being sent
to, or do a group reply, which sends a copy to the list as well as to the
original sender.

A subtle change, but one that has thrown the list in a tizzy. Some people
(like me) like the old behavior. Some like the new behavior (and are
telling the ones that like the old behavior to deal or upgrade—odd
considering that most accessing the list are using computers deemed too old
to use by the rest of society).

4.4.3. REPLY-TO / RESENT-REPLY-TO
This field provides a general mechanism for indicating any
mailbox(es) to which responses are to be sent. Three typical
uses for this feature can be distinguished. In the first
case, the author(s) may not have regular machine-based mail-
boxes and therefore wish(es) to indicate an alternate machine
address. In the second case, an author may wish additional
persons to be made aware of, or responsible for, replies. A
somewhat different use may be of some help to "text message
teleconferencing" groups equipped with automatic distribution
services: include the address of that service in the "Reply-
To" field of all messages submitted to the teleconference;
then participants can "reply" to conference submissions to
guarantee the correct distribution of any submission of their
own.

Note: The “Reply-To” field is added by the
originator and serves to direct replies, whereas the
“Return-Path” field is used to identify a path back to
the originator. [This is from section 4.3.1
of RFC-822. But
see section 4.4.3 for a different interpretation. -Sean]

Although I'm starting to wonder if this isn't symptomatic of a
majordomo bug, or at least a design flaw. It would make sense to me
to configure Majordomo such that the Reply-To points to the list
*unless* the originator added its own Reply-To, in which case it
would leave that there. That way, you'd have discussion on the list
except when the original poster intended otherwise, which strikes me
as something that the original poster might very well want. This
would satisfy the objection of lost information (which strikes me as
the only thing that isn't a question of preference or user-agent
configuration – when majordomo strips a reply-to, it's *gone*)
and the objection of encouraging public discussion (in that unless
otherwise specified by the originator, the reply is directed to the
list).

Pete Turnbull replied with:

Except that mailing lists are not what RFC 822 defined
“Reply-to:” for. Its primary purpose is quite
different; it's to force a reply to a valid address when the
sender's “From:” is not valid.

Quote: “The 'Reply-To' field is added by the
originator”

The RFC 822 method would be to set the “From:” field
to [mailing list address], and set the “Sender:” field
to the name of the person who originated the message (which is
exactly the opposite to what majordomo is doing, I notice, but
that's perfectly legitimate).

My roomate
Rob is
rebuilding his workstation that was hacked
the other day. He could repair
it by rebuilding the damaged directories but he feels it's easier to
resintall and I probably would do the same myself. There is stuff he wants
to save but since
Tom's RootBoot disk
doesn't have drivers for his network card he came in asking if I had a spare
IDE drive he could borrow.

Possibly, but let's see if there is something easier first. Could he just
install without formatting the disks? No, there are some configuration
files he wants to save. Hmmmm … he's got this swap partition that's big
enough to hold what he wants. fdisk to change it to Linux native,
then mke2fs to format it. Copy the files he wants, reinstall, then
afterwards, copy the files off, and turn it back to swap space.

The consensus on the mailing list from
yesturday about Reply-To:
munging is that Reply-To: is The Right Thing. The list is
back to the old behavior and everyone has stopped complaining.

The topic now (very light traffic on this) is the removal of HTML in email.
Or rather, HTML and attachments altogether, which I am in full agreement
with. Attachments are evil (heck, MIME is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil but
that's another rant); the worst I saw (when I worked at an ISP) was some guy
who blew his disk quota by sending not only the files he was working on, but
the application as well, so he could work on them from home.

The ISP allows 10M of disk space, which is quite generous for email (for the
record, I currently have 14M of email saved (everything I write gets saved
just in case) and it works out to 3,457 messages (or an average of 4k per
message and yes, a lot of those can be deleted).

Anyway, one of the requests, from Peter Turnbull, was:

My request-for-enhancement is:
``do something'' about HTML, or better still, ``do something'' about
any ``multipart/alternative'' posting (which would include M$
richtext, with those application/ms-tnef attachments).
Options I can think of:
a) silently discard any such postings (probably not a good idea)
b) bounce them back to the author, with an explanation of why bounced
c) remove the non-text part
d) combination of (b) and (c)
e) accept, but warn the author (who may not realise (s)he's sent HTML)

Then I realized that such an externally defined vision had already been
forced on the technology industry. The standards of the Internet, HTTP, HTML
and URLs; and perhaps XML, which is a simple formalization of HTML. To go to
the next step the leaders of technology merely have to agree to stop
struggling against these standards, and to share the knowledge they have
developed around them. The web is ready-made for a shared vision.

. . .

First, you should know that there are organizations whose sole purpose is to
define and patent new business processes that build on the Internet. Jay
Walker, the founder of Priceline.Com, has 60 full-time people working in
teams to do nothing more than generate patents. No engineering, no scaling
issues, no customer satisfaction requirements (although Walker's company
appears to be good at this too), they just a file a claim at various patent
offices, and wait for the engineering of the Internet to catch up. A
land-grab business.

. . .

If you define success in terms of continuing to do the same old thing, you
will lose. This is the message that causes so much dissonance at Davos and
at Seybold. The people who had a good thing going before the Internet are
angry. If they draw a line in the sand, as Sumner Redstone of Viacom did so
insistently, sorry it's off to glue factory. But if you're willing to risk
it all on your intelligence, experience *and* your enthusiasm for the
Internet, you will win. But you have to be willing to change.

When I moved here 12 years ago, across the street (the main street, Sample
Road in Coconut Creek, Florida) was this large field. A rare site in Lower
Sheol where any available piece of undeveloped land doesn't remain
undeveloped for very long.

But it lasted a few years, until Wayne Hyzinga (sp?), Garbageman Billionair
Extrodinaire, financed the building of an AutoNation there across the
street, then sold it (for profit mind you) to one of his holding companies.
Ah, the wheeling and dealing life of a billionaire.

And so it was until a few weeks ago when the AutoNation suddenly closed its
doors across the street. The parking lot, once full of quality used cars at
an affordable, no haggle price, was empty.

And so it was.

So I was driving home tonight when I saw these placards along the road, and
in primary colors splashed across the face, I saw:

The Coconut Creek Casino! Parking—Turn here!

And all the placards were leading towards the AutoNation parking lot.
Great! I thought. They built a casino across the street!

So I decide to check things out. I park the car at home, and amble my way
over across the street. I see a few cars parked there, but nothing that
looks remotely like a casino. I walk up to the front entrance of the now
closed AutoNation and find a security-type guy there in one of those
golfcart like vehicles.

“It's right behind there. The parking lot isn't finished yet so they're
using this as a temporary parking lot. The shuttle bus should be here in a
minute.”

“No, that's okay. I was just curious.” And I walked off.

I guessed that the Seminole Indians had the thing built, and when lo,
I was
right.

If this thing is open 24 hours like all other casinos I've been to, then
that adds one more fine dining establishment to partake of fine food after
midnight to the local Clock and Denny's.
As I see it, the Seminole Indians had the thing built.

I just spent the past few hours working on this journalblog, updating the
pages and internal links, getting ready to get this thing live hopefully in
the next few days. Internal links are still worthless, but hey, only a few
people should be reading this anyway.

Now I just have to find some code I wrote a few months ago in preparation
for the Electric
King James site. If I can find it, and adapt it to use strings instead
of integers, then I can retrofit it into
mod_litbook and use
it in (tenanively titled) mod_jb.

But that's the problem … I don't even remember what I called it, nor where
I stuff the code. And I have a lot of code on this system.

On Monday (which I didn't report), I went to
Atlantic Internet
to do some consulting. One of the salespeople there is involved in some
projects and I was brought in to help.

While there, the box being used, a RedHat 6.0 distribution, appeared to have
been compromised. No like
my roommate's box but still,
syslogd wasn't running like it should, and there appeared to be an
abnormal amount of httpd's running, but it's a webserver so I
didn't think anything of it.

I shut off ftpd and added entries to /etc/hosts.allow and
/etc/hosts.deny until it could be patched up or upgraded.

Fast forward to today (way early or way late, take your pick) and I'm
reading Slashdot when I
come across the article
about some recent DoS attacks against some very large sites. In the
discussion, I follow one of the links to an
analysis of stacheldraht, a program that is suspected to have been used
in the DoS. And the code seems to have been written for Solaris 2.x and
Linux, specifically the RedHat 6.0 distribution.

… and by October of 1990 a complete nanokernel was running on the Omron
Luna/88K. The current nanokernel contains approximately 20,000 lines of C
code and less than 2,000 lines of assembler code….

In addition, the ability to recover all run-time kernel data from
checkpointed state means that an interruption of power does not disrupt
running programs. Typically, the system loses only the last few seconds of
keyboard input. At UNIFORUM '90, Key Logic pulled the plug on our UNIX
system on demand. Within 30 seconds of power restoration, the system had
resumed processing, complete with all windows and state that had previously
been on the display. We are aware of no other UNIX implementation with this
feature today….

The paging system is tied to the checkpoint mechanism, and is discussed in
the section on checkpointing, below. Persistence extends across system
shutdown and power failure. Several IBM 4341 systems ran for more than three
years across power failures without a logical interruption of service.

Accordingly, KeyKOS also received a B3 security rating, and it's a
multitasking, multiuser system. At best, Unix can get a C2, and
Windows NT can get that if it's networking is removed. I don't think it's
generally available, but one that is based upon KeyKOS,
EROS, is available,
and GPLed.

I get curious at times. At one point I wanted to register spc.com,
being my initials and whatnot, but Time Magazine registered that one on July
14, 1994. I've never bothered to ask if I could have it, but I can't
imagine what they're using it for (nothing, as I can tell).

So I decide to check out spc.org, which seems to be a better domain
for my use anyway. When I tried a few years ago, it was taken but I forgot
who had it. The current owners registered it June 7, 1997. So I might have
gotten it had I been on the ball three years ago, but I wasn't.

And that leaves spc.net, which was registered to the Special
Products Company on June 22, 1996, and
they seem to be using it
as well.

I can't have conman.com because that is being sit upon by a domain
name speculator company, noname.com.

But the big surprise is
conman.net. Last time
I checked (a few weeks ago) it was being held by noname.com but
that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. It is now held by
Conner
Huff.

Now, conner.com is owned by
Seagate, the
harddrive manufacturer. Understandable, Conner used to be a well-known
harddrive manufacturer before being bought out by Seagate.
conner.org and conner.net are owned by
MailBank.com, an
organization that gives out email addresses. As of today,
sean@conner.org
is available as an email address, but at US$9.95/month, I think I'll stick
with what I have.

So, I'm searching through the
www.spc.org website when
I come to this
lovely page with one
of those stereograms. I have no problem in seeing the item inside the
picture, but I don't think I see it “correctly” so to speak. I say that
because while the object (in this case, a jack) does pop out, the parts that
pop out are popped inward, not outward. For example, if the object is
supposed to be a ball floating off the page, I see the object floating, but
I see it as a bowl, not a ball. It's definitely a wierd experience.

I suspect that I see these objects “inside-out” (for lack of a better
term) because my left eye is dominant (I'm lefthanded, by the way) wereas
most people are right-eye dominant.

You can easily test this by holding your hands out in front of you, at arm's
length, using your fingers to make a hole to view through. Focus on an
object that's about 20 feet away (or further). Now, close one eye. If you
can still see the object, that is your dominant eye (or conversely, if you
can't see it, then your other eye is dominant).

Earlier today we talked and he was wondering how to get the images up to
the server. He didn't
want to use FTP as it seems that no one can actually write
a version that isn't Swiss Cheese, nor did he want to use scp as
that would require him manually typing in a password, or leaving one around
in a script on his box.

I offered to write some programs, a client on his end, a server on the
server end here that does nothing but copy the image up. Simple enough in
theory.

But the details get pretty gory pretty quickly.

But then it hit me—he's running a webserver on his end. Easy enough to
have the camera software dump the picture into a web-accessable place on his
box, then have the server here use wget to download the image.

LiveJournal.com is a free service here on the Internet that allows you to
create and customize your very own “live journal” … an up-to-the-minute
log of whatever you're doing, when you're doing it. It's free, it's fun,
it's easy to use!

The actual link from Flutterby was to
the LiveJournal
protocol. The protocol itself it nothing more than a documentation of
their CGI interface. It's documented with the intention of other people
writing software to interface to the CGI, but a webform would work just as
well (or at least support the HTTP POST method).

For the individual journals, you can only see an overview of the last
X number of entries, in reverse order of course (newest to oldest,
and even the entires made within a single day are newest to oldest).

The archive section lists each month, with a link per day (the text of the
link is the number of individual entries that day). The day is then
presented in chronological order. But, you can't request all the entries
for a month. For instance: Bethany's
LiveJournal Calendar. Select a day, say
today.

Now, take a look at the URL:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bethany/day?year=2000&month=2&day=11

Munging it up, I left off the day portion and got:

Errors occurred processing this page:

Corrupt or non-existant day.

Invalid day.

(nevermind that is the full text of what I got back—completely
non-standard HTML). Okay, what if I change the URL to read:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bethany/month?year=2000&month=11

Would I then get all of February's entries? Nope. Just a 404
error (and an error page that again, isn't HTML compliant). Then again, I
don't think anyone is really working on the stuff I'm working on, but when I
get this out there, that should raise the bar a bit (hope hope).

LiveJournal isn't a bad service but there doesn't seem to be many journals
there I find worth reading (with most entries being a line or two at best).

So for those of you following at home, I'm playing around a bit with the
layout here. There is this layout you are looking at right now.

This page has a navigation bar along
the right side, pointing to the individual links for the past seven days
(none of the links work by the way. It's using a URL scheme that I'm
planning on using but isn't functional yet). I did it this way for users of
Lynx—it lays out tables that go left to right top to bottom; not the best
way to support tables, but hey, it tries. And I felt that innundating a
Lynx user with a list of links is bad. Better to bring the content first
then a list of (possibly) useless links.

But I did this page, and under Lynx it
actually isn't too bad. The first link is to the content (if in fact, the
link works). And at the default 80x24 TTY screen size, there's only two,
maybe three screens full of links before you get to the content. Oddly
enough, I like it.

It's not like I have a death of projects I'm working on, but one of the
projects is finally getting
NetBSD installed on
two HP/Apollo 400's I recieved a few years ago but couldn't because of a few
problems.

The original intent was to write an OS for the things, but information about
the HPs weren't that easy to get (not that I tried really hard). After a
year or two I learned that NetBSD was ported.

That lead to problem number two: I had the wrong keyboard. The HP/Apollos
I received had the Domain keyboard/mouse, which NetBSD doesn't support, and
apparently the boot process for DomainOS is undocumented enough that no one
has really bothered. Had I an HP-HIL keyboard/mouse, then I would be in
business.

Well, I recently borrowed one and my friend
Mark is working
on getting me an HP-HIL adaptor so I can use an IBM keyboard like God
intended instead of the abomination that HP calls a keyboard.

Have I mentioned I'm very picky about keyboards? That the only keyboards I
use are IBM AT or PS/2 style keyboards? Anyway, I digress …

So, easy enough to proceed, right?

Nope. Problem number three: there is no more space in the Computer Room.
I could barely make my way into the room. So, before I can install NetBSD I
have to clean the room and rearrange it. It was so bad I didn't even recall
how the network was set up (thin-net, aka cheap net. I had black cables
running everywhere).

So I spent most of last night schlepping computers out to the living room
and dining room. The Computer Room is now clean, but the rest of the house
…

So now I'm in the process of schlepping everything back, only I don't want
to schlep everything back in. I have no idea what I'm going to do with half
the stuff. I don't use half the stuff and that's the problem.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get NetBSD reinstalled and I'm having to recompile
Linux on my primary server here in the Computer Room because it doesn't have
RARP (Reverse Address Resultion Protocol) built in, which is needed to do an
initial netboot of NetBSD.

An update on the HP/NetBSD front: and that's the only thing that's up.

The boot process requires NFS. I don't trust NFS (never have, never
bothered to install it on the home system here). Sigh. Download, install,
configure.

So I have rbootd and rarp working on Linus. Turn on the
HP. Using some network monitoring software I wrote (a near-clone of tcpdump
that outputs in a more concise mannor) I can see the HP making requests of
rbootp.

Well, the first of two HPs is now online and running NetBSD, thanks to the
help of
Mark. It seems
I needed to have bootparamd running, as well as NFS. Also, the
documentation neglected to mention that you might, just might, need to hook
a terminal up to the machine.

Lo, there was SYS_INST, running not on the console (the wonderful
21" monitor) but on the serial port. Sigh. After that it was
a painfully long process of transfering the installation program via NFS
(although that may be due to the logging we were doing) then the actual
install process (via FTP, much faster).

Slackware Linux was a breeze to install compared to this. The whole disk
labeling is confusing—I find the PC scheme much easier to deal with
(although Mark finds the PC scheme too braindead and likes the added
complexity that disk labels bring. Go figure). We still haven't figured
out how to get the system to boot off the drive, but it is running.

Iaijutsu
sounds interesting, a web server that separates content, presentation and
logic, which is what I'm trying to do. But at this time, the website seems
to be down. Or rather, DNS is reporting back an error.

Maybe I'll get back to this some other time. Even if it is written in Perl.

It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every
trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally
and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary
progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive
privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates
a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the
advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented
monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the
country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts.
It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions
of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in
good faith.

–U.S. Supreme Court, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882

Via
Technocrat.net, this
article about
software and business patents. One of these days I'll get around to
patenting a method and aparatus for obtaining quantities comprised of groups
of smaller quantities grouped and counted for the larger quantity.

My roommate Rob
came into the Computer Room this morning and asked if I wanted to go to
lunch. He was going out with some of the tech crew from
Atlantic Internet
(who so kindly provide my connectivity) and wanted to know if I wanted to go
along. I wasn't all that hungry, having actually had breakfast before 8am
(long hacking run last night, more on that later) but since I decided to
stay up anyway (cleaning woman—yes I'm that lazy) why not?

We ended up going to Lucille's, a local BBQ place in Boca Raton. I was
feeling a bit sluggish by the time the food arrived, and the waitress, at
Shane's
request, brought over not one, but two of the hottest sauces
currently available.

I remember Endorphine Rush from the
last time I was there. The other
one was a new one they just got: Blair's After Death Sauce. I was
the only one there to actually try it.

The opening was slightly crusted over with dried sauce so it took some
coaxing to get a small dab out, which is all I dared. Then dipped my fork
into the dab, then tried it.

“Oh—” is all I got out before slamming down my iced tea while motioning
wildly at the waitress for more. She quickly returned with a glass of milk,
which I slammed down, and by that time she had a refill on the iced tea,
which I nearly slammed down. And when I say “slammed down,” I mean chug.
Big time. Like I've never chugged before.

I was no longer tired. I was wide awake after that.

And checking the bottle after a few minutes showed the sauce had eaten away
at the drived sauce crust over the end of the bottle. Yikes!

Endorphine Rush wasn't that bad. No effect for a few seconds then
WHAM! It hits. Pretty hard. Blair's After Death Sauce
hits fast and hard. Liquid fire this was. Ouch. Wasabi doesn't hit this
hard with so little.

I haven't updated in the past few days. That's okay, because I have an
excuse: my computer was dying.

Well, it wasn't exactly dying, but X Windows—sorry, A Windowing System
Called X, was dying. It happened last week when the mouse suddenly went
spastic then died. Then shortly thereafter A Windowing System Called X died
too. Most horrible. Even worse, I didn't have the CD I installed Linux
from (nor a CD-ROM but that's beside the point). Even worse, it was
the Metrolink X
Server that died.

The system was a RedHat 5.0 system. I did not want to upgrade or
install RedHat 6.0 or 6.1. I wanted 5.2. Mark found his copy of RedHat
5.2.

So, I decided it was probably time to do a fresh install. I slapped a 1G
drive, backed up what needed to be backed up (and missed /root and
/tmp in the process—oh well, probably didn't need those files
anyway) and then proceeded to the installation.

I've found out that trying to install RedHat 5.2 across the network from a
RedHat 6.1 box is a futile exercise. NFS or FTP the
network performance was so poor that doing a disk install of Slackware would
be faster.

Then it hit me—I was reinstalling my primary nameserver. This is also the
nameserver that resolves reverse lookups. Even my roommate's computer would
eventually contact my machine for reverse lookups on the IP addresses.

Ooops.

Quickly fix that, but still find that installing RedHat 5.2 from a RedHat
6.1 box is a futile exercise.

I tried three CD-ROM drives in the computer and not once was it recognized.
Of course I was putting the CD-ROM in the second IDE controller on
the motherboard but I think the second IDE controller doesn't work.
Disconnect the 1G drive and put the CD-ROM in there, and it worked (of
course at first I thought it didn't since the BIOS wouldn't
recognize it. Mark was like “Duh! It's not IDE! It's
ATAPI. The linux kernel will find it.”

The install went smoothly. I repartitioned the drives the way I like (4M
/boot, twice the RAM for swap, and the rest for /) and installed
RedHat 5.2. I was expecting the Metrolink X server to install, but it
didn't.

Twice more and it still didn't. Guess Metrolink stopped shipping their
server with RedHat. And XFree86 doesn't support my card (or at least it
didn't when RedHat 5.2 came out and like I said, I'm not going RedHat 6.x
nor spending hours downloading the current XFree86 and configuring it).

I finally got X working though, and restored from the backup IDE
drive.

So I wound up at Mark's house last night. He
wanted to get AppleTalk running so he could mount his Linux drives on his
Macs.

He was going to do this on his primary development machine
kwalitee, but was relunctant to loose the uptime on it. I
suggested ortho, his primary file server.

He was overwhelmed by the sheer obviousness of the suggestion.

Compile kernel. Download userland code. Install. Reboot. Select
“Chooser” on the Mac. And there is ortho, ready to serve up files. We
were both amazed at how easy it was—especially given the difficulty of
Samba, or the insanity that are the automounter documentation (the man
pages, how-to's and other documentation for the automounter bear no
relationship to the actual program that he used. It's like learning Unix
from MS-DOS manuals).

Until he had to make a slight configuration change. The AppleTalk server
wasn't returning the correct type or application for MP3s (I'll save the
discussion of finding and uncompressing an MP3 player for the Mac for
later). Okay, tweak a configuration file and restart the AppleTalk daemon.

Only it won't restart.

Nothing we do will restart it short of a reboot. So we reboot.

And reboot and reboot and reboot and reboot. Any change we make to the
AppleTalk configuration file requires a reboot of Linux. Had Mark made the
driver a module and unloaded it, then we wouldn't have to reboot. But
having a modular kernel as a server is a potential security hole and Mark
doesn't want that risk.

So it's reboot reboot reboot.

We then scour the net for updated anything.

It seems it's a known problem that you have to reboot if you change any
configuration for AppleTalk.

Linux is Open Source, right?

Mark wants to reconfigure AppleTalk and not have to reboot. He's got this
itch, right?

Since I installed a later version of RedHat (5.2) on linus that was on there
before (5.0) I have a newer version of Netscape. Instead of version 4.04
(the NOTFOUND version) I now have 4.07 (the PROXYAUTHREQ
version).

Mark has
written some pages
about hacking the
Atalk driver in Linux. Another note not noted in the note: he reported
that it doesn't work on another of his Linux systems—the major difference
being a different network card. Is the Linux kernel that fragile
that a difference in network causes a protocol stack to fail?

Mark wrote in
today to say that reverse lookups for my domain weren't working properly.
And lo, nslookup was having a hard time finding the machine it was
running on.

At first I thought maybe it was a problem with what I was trying to do with
the latest version of bind. You see, I set things up such that I
control the reverse lookup on the 32 IP addresses
Atlantic Internet
provides me.

This is done via an interesting hack. For the appropriate
in-addr.arpa file, I have:

0 IN NS linus.slab.conman.org.
1 IN NS linus.slab.conman.org.

And so on for the 32 addresses I've been assigned. Then, for the namesever
here in the Computer Room, I have:

Not that I'm inviting anyone to try, but good luck trying to break into
area51.slab.conman.org. You won't get very far nor is it a very
interesting box. A Compaq 486DX/2 running at 66MHz with 20M of RAM and no
harddrive.

Yet it is on the network.

It's running a modifed
Tom's Rootboot disk
distribution with some network monitoring software I wrote. I just thought
the name was cute.

I'm updating my code on tumblers.
Tumblers is a crucial portion of
Xanadu, the hypertext
system designed by Ted Nelson and still being worked on (only 40 years
later).

My tumblers work differently than the Xanalogical mode. There they are true
numbers on which certain operations like addition and subtraction can be
applied to address nodes (and all the nodes contained therein) whereas mine
are not numerical at at and the operations that are performed on them do not
have mathematical relationships. At least not in the Xanalogical sense.

Both systems (mine and Ted's) do allow ranges to be specified, but the
mechanics differ. I'm not going to go into how Xanalogical tumblers work
since that's described elsewhere. But I am going to describe what I'm
working on.

Basically, my tumblers (for lack of a better term, that's why I'm using it
currently) is just a list of node identifiers, with those listed first
higher up than those below it, much like USENET groups. You have
comp that contain all the computer related discussion groups, and
below that you have comp.lang, which contain all the articles
pertaining to computer languages to finally having comp.lang.forth, dealing with a
particular computer language. And you are not limited to just the period
for separating nodes—I also use slash and colon (for several reasons I
won't get into right now).

But another aspect is describing ranges. A range specifier consists of left
and right sides separated by a dash. The left side specifies the starting
node, while the right side specifies the ending node, relative to the
starting node. So that:

A.b.1-3

would specify the nodes A.b.1, A.b.2 and A.b.3. Notice
that there are three node segments on the left side and only one on the
right. That's important. The missing segments on the right side are
inherited from the left. This inheritance only takes place if the right
side has fewer segments than the left side. If the right side is longer
than the left, it is assumed that the right side is a full specifier, like
the left side is.

And so far, the code I have in
mod_litbook handles
those cases (dealing with the King James Bible for now). What it
doesn't handle are separate but related ranges.

For instance,

A.b.1,5

The interpretation I use would return nodes A.b.1 and
A.b.5 but nothing else in between. In this case, the comma is used
to specify to independant nodes, but with the same relationship rules used
in ranges. So far so good, but I want to be able to handle something like:

I was hanging out with Mark and Jeff and one of the
topics of conversation was over filesystems.

Okay, I'll admit up front we tend to be a bit geeky.

Anyway, a conversation about filesystems. I don't like the way Unix handles
the filesystem, slapping everything under one tree, but I came from a rather
heavy MS-DOS, VMS and AmigaOS background where you had volume labels (okay,
so the support under MS-DOS was rather weak and ineffectual). Under
AmigaDOS (for instance) if I have a floppy with a name of “StarControl”
(which I actually do) and I insert it, I now have a volume I can look
through called “StarControl:”. And if there is a program on that disk
(which there is) it can reference files from the volume “StarControl:”
such as “StarControl:config” or “StarControl:scenarios/galactic war”.
And, copy protection concerns aside, I can copy the files off the floppy
disk onto the harddrive (“Captain Napalm:”) into a games directory and
then set the volume “StarControl:” to be equivalent to “Captain
Napalm:games/star.control” and have everything work without problem.

“Ahha!” said Mark. “That's all great and everything but what if you
insert two floppies with the same name?” Erm … ah … <cough>
<cough> “And what if,” he continued, “I have a lot of volumes?
There could be name clashes. Like both the C compiler and Pascal compiler
looking for files from volume Compile?” Erm … uh … look! The Sweedish
Bikini team!

“And why have a different syntax for the the volume name and then the rest
of the filesystem?” asks Mark, avoiding my transparent attempt at changing
the subject. “Do you allow slashes in the volume name?”

“Sure,” I said.

“And do you allow colons in filenames?”

“I'm sadistic enough of a programmer to say yes.”

“AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” he said. But point taken.

Mark, on the other hand, like the One Tree, Über Alles
approach to a file system. Other machines on the network would appear
under, say, /net. But that seems wrong to me. Each local machine
is the top of their respective trees when it seems like it should be the
other way around.

“But if I'm on a non-networked machine, just where should the root be?
Should it be under /net/machinename?” Mark asked.

Spent the day staying up way too late this morning, getting too little sleep
and then helping my friends Paul and Lorie move from their two story
townhome to a second story appartment all day, then staying up way too late
hanging out with other friends.

I arrived at Paul and Lorie's a bit past 10 am. I was running a bit late,
but then again, I don't understand how anyone can function before noon on a
daily basis.

Jeff and Sarah were already there, helping Paul and Lorie load the truck
with boxes. When I arrived, the loading of furniture commensed, along with
the majority of remaining boxes.

Getting the furniture downstairs was fun—having to navigate turn halfway
down made it all the more fun. Paul wasn't sure what to do with the large
entertainment center in the living room—it was huge and there was concern
about moving it into the new apartment (remember, it's on the second floor).
After a small attempt to move it and have one section separate from another
(think of three shelve units bolted together and you get an idea of what
this thing was like) I suggested that the unit be taken apart—just remove
the top and the sides would just pop off.

No tools, so Jeff and I went to Jeff's house to pick up his tool box. Came
back and spent maybe half an hour taking the thing apart. Had to remove the
back (well, part of the back) as well as the top but it made it more
manageable, but the truck by that point was nearly full so it was left
behind (along with some other bulky furniture) for a second trip.

At the new place, the stairs leading to the second floor of the apartment
went up half a flight, landing, then continued up the other direction to a
walkway, where it was several hundred feet to the apartment door (around
three turns no less—large apartment building). Kurt had arrived by this
time so an assembly line formed—Jeff in the truck bringing boxes to the
loading door, Paul carrying the boxes and lifting them to me, standing on
the lower stair landing where I would walk up two or three steps and toss
them on the second floor landing, where Kurt, Sarah and Lorie would then
pick the a box (or two) up and carry it (or cart it) to the apartment.

After the boxes, any long item would be handed directly up to someone
leaning over the second floor railing who would catch and bring it up over
the railing and place it for someone to come by and cart it off to the
apartment.

Lunch. Then the second trip, much like the first. Then dinner.

By that time everyone was exhausted.

So of course I hung out with
Mark and Jeff
(a different Jeff) that night.

The world runs on a different, and worse, an alien clock, to me. I called
the A/C repair people because the A/C that was just installed seems to be
freezing up. I called around 3:30 pm (I got up around 2 pm) and I got voice
mail. Does that mean I'm going to have to get up at some ungodly hour like
10 am or so just to make sure I get actual human beings at the A/C repair
company?

It also makes it rather … interesting playing the stock market, seeing how
it closes down at 4 pm EST. Supposedly there are “after market” hours but
I haven't seen much evidance of that.

It's not that I'm lazy mind you—it's just that I might have a condition
known as
DSPS,Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.
Don't laugh, it does exist but there are very few doctors that have heard
about it. Sigh.

I also spent the day looking for a stock to invest in as well as updating
the journal entry here.

ytalk doesn't work on linus (my home system). Nor does
talk. Strange, I have it enabled, but it just isn't working and
it seems to be horribly damaged.

This is Unix. So what else is new?

Seriously. There are at least two different talk protocols,
neither one documented (unless you count source code to be usuable
documentation, much like uuencode when you get down to it) and both
incompatible with each other. Which is why ytalk is nice—it
preportedly talks both so it doesn't matter.

Only it's not working.

Over the years I've found it harder and harder to find working
implementations of *talk on any system but I did have a working
version I could use to talk to a few friends with before the install of
RedHat 5.2 on linus (it was running RedHat 5.0 before).

Now it's general braindamage all over the place.

In trying to debug the problem, I found that /etc/inetd.conf had a
bogus entry for dtalk (whatever that is) so I commented it out.
Still didn't work. Uncomment telnet on the advice of
Mark to see if
inetd is okay.

telnet isn't working. What the … ? I try killing off
inetd and restarting it. Same deal.

Is it possible for a newer release to exhibit so much lossage? That isn't a
Microsoft product?

Try re-enabling FTP. Same lossage.

Turns out I had neglected to install TCP-wrappers. Nice that the RedHat
install program neglected to make a dependancy on that. But it includes
Perl. Goes out of its way to include Perl.

Such is life in Unixland.

I should note that I get easily upset when stuff that should work
doesn't. Computers don't have to be this difficult. There shouldn't be
this much lossage and braindeath in dealing with computers. But I suspect
that most programmers can't cope with such ideas. Programmers give
programming a bad name.

Ring. Is it already time to get up? Wait a second … that doesn't
sound like the alarm clock.

Ring. Crap! The phone! I hoped I wasn't too late—it'll be
really annoying if the answering machine picks up. “Hello?”

“Hi. You've reached area code three zero five …” Great. Answering
machine got it. Now I have to make the 30 second commute to the Computer
Room and stop it. And what bloody time is it anyway? It had better be the
A/C guys—I called yesturday and left a message with them. I stumbled
around, turned off the machine. “Hello?”

“Hey guy! It's 9:30! We need you here!”

It was C. S., a salesdroid from Atlantic Internet. I've been helping him
with some projects lately and he needed help. Good thing he was 15 miles
away or he would have needed some help. “When can you come in?”

“After two,” I said. I think. I don't fully remember the conversation.
Life doesn't begin before noon.

“Two?”

“grumble”

“Okay, see you then.” He sounded entirely too chippy. What is it with
people being up at these ungodly hours?

“Salvation Army, can you hold?” I don't have enough time to answer before
I'm put on hold. Several minutes go by. “Salvation Army, may I help
you?”

“Yes, I'd like to donate some old computer equipment,” I said. I have a
ton of old computer equipment I'd like to get rid of. About a dozen
monitors (mostly monochrome or CGA), a dozen or so PCs (of XT or 286-AT
class) and some other miscellaneous equipment I've accumulated over the
years.

“Is this an office?”

“No, it's a private house.” I swear I could hear the person on the other
end blinking in disbelief. “I have some older equipment I want to get rid
of.” More blinking. “Can you pick it up?”

“Are they usable as home computers? If not, then we'll just throw them
away and that actually costs us money.”

Interesting question. The monitors work. Most of the PCs work but are
large and bulky. About the only thing you can run on them is MS-DOS, maybe
up to version 3.3 or so. Throw Procomm or Qmodem and they'll make decent,
if bulky, terminals. But who ya gonna call, eh?

“Probably not,” I answer.

“Okay. Thanks for calling.” We hung up.

Maybe painting the whole lot gold and selling it as art on
eBay is the way to go.

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go
ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or
entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent
links to that entry only. The format for the links are
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interested in, say 2000/08/01,
so that would make the final URL:

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's
intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the
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